


and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor

by Ariesgirl666



Category: Heathers (1988), Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-16 20:44:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14173032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariesgirl666/pseuds/Ariesgirl666
Summary: "School is much more entertaining now that she’s here, laughing in the halls, letting the edges of her wings nudge his shoulder.(He thinks she might be an angel, but he’s never done anything to deserve one.)"Sort of a follow-up to "one misstep, you're mine" except this time, it's Veronica who's the monster.Title quote from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"





	1. heaven help you, the girl likes to fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> title from "Punchin' Bag" by Cage the Elephant

He sees her for the first time at the library, when he hears a rustle in the stacks above him and looks up. There’s a girl, long legs bare under a patchwork dress that’s very badly put together. Her feet are covered in dirt, and she’s perched on top of the Mythology section, looking down at him curiously.

Behind her, something rustles -he thinks it’s a blanket or something, but then he sees that they’re wings -enormous raven’s wings that gleam like oil.

He gapes. She puts one finger to her lips and smiles.

 

 

The second time, he’s sitting outside a 7-11 when a small hand scoops out part of his slushie. This time, she’s wearing a blue tiered skirt and a black crop top, which hangs off her scrawny shoulders awkwardly. She still has wings.

The look of surprise, and then delight, on her face when she puts her hand to her mouth makes him genuinely smile for the first time in -shit, it must be years.

He offers her the rest of the slushie. She hands him the straw and buries her face in the plastic cup. When she comes up again, the bottom half of her face is blood-red and soaked, and she’s laughing. He is too. When they stop laughing she leans forward, hesitantly, as if he might startle, and licks sugar and food-coloring off his bottom lip.

 

It’s at school when JD realizes that nobody else can see her -in English class when she sits on the empty desk next to him and snickers at the posturing of whatever the latest clique is called. She’s leaning against his locker -he isn’t sure what she wants, but the girl( _thing_ ) seems harmless. “They spelled ‘fag’ wrong,” she says, pointing to the slur smeared across his locker, and that makes him laugh. “This is a terrible education system,” she insists, but she’s smiling too, her darkly seraphic wings folded behind her back, feathers sticking up awkwardly.

 

School is much more entertaining now that _she’s_ here, laughing in the halls, letting the edges of her wings nudge his shoulder.

(He thinks she might be an angel, but he’s never done anything to deserve one.)

 

When red-lipsticked Heather pulls a particularly cruel ‘prank’ on him, his new friend’s eyes narrow. He tells her how he thinks about shooting Heather, even with blanks, and he doesn’t expect the vicious smile that spreads across her face. Without another word, the pale, nameless girl with feathers in her hair stands up and goes to sit with the Heathers. Instead of ignoring her or tormenting her like JD expects, Heather Chandler smiles softly and entwines her fingers with the patchwork girl’s, and is he seriously feeling jealous right now?

 

He doesn’t see her for the next few days, except for when she’s walking besides Heather Chandler and laughing. The other two don’t seem to be able to see her, or maybe just ignore her, but Chandler lets the not-quite-human girl try on her red scrunchie. JD sees them in the hallway, Red Heather leaving a lipstick kiss on the girl _(thing)_ ’s cheek. She turns just enough to make it a full kiss, and then they’re making out in the middle of the hallway, in an Ohio high school, and it’s as if nobody else can see them. When Heather turns to go, the charcoal-winged girl drapes a possessive arm around her shoulders and turns to smile at JD.

 

The next day, Heather Chandler commits suicide.

 

“You did it, didn’t you?” is the first thing JD says when he sees _her_ , waiting at their table, wearing a red scrunchie, a newly pleated skirt, and a proud smile.

Her wings rustle, and when she blinks, her pupils are slit. “You’re welcome,” she says simply, and licks something viscous and red off of her finger.

 

He thinks she’s a demon, after sleepless hours of research on fairies and fey and succubi, monsters and virgins and girls with wings.

 

Green Heather bumps into her in the cafeteria, and the winged girl smiles and whispers something in her ear. Green Heather smiles, almost dreamily, disturbingly similar to Heather Chandler’s smile _before_ , and accepts the scrunchie pressed into her hand.

 

When he asks her if she’s been sent here for a reason, she raises her eyebrows, amused. “I go where I please,” she says. “No one sends me anywhere.”

“Like a housecat?” he teases, and she shoves his shoulder and laughs. He glances over at the empty space between Heathers 2 and 3, and his smile falters.

 

“I’m fine,” he snarls, pushing her hands away, because it’s been weeks since the Chandler thing happened, and he doesn’t want her to do anything ( _monstrous_ ) like that anymore. She sits back on her haunches and studies his face. “Nobody should hurt you.”

“It’s life.” He wipes the blood from hisnose with one hand, and is it his imagination or did her nostrils flare a little at that. “I can deal with a pair of homophobic assholes.”

“Shouldn’t have to,” she mutters, but she doesn’t press the issue.

 

“What are you?” JD blurts finally, and she buries her coy red smile in the palm of her hand. “I’m a Veronica,” she tells him, and he figures that’s the closest thing to an answer he’ll ever get.


	2. don't tempt her (she's got those evil eyes)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Veronica perches on one of the matching coffins at the funeral and mimics the priest’s speech. She’s wearing a football jersey with RS on the sleeve over a sheer black dress. Her feet are bare and grass-stained. She has a little bit of blood in the corner of her mouth. JD feels nauseous.
> 
> chapter title from "Creepy Girl" by Ghost Town

The next morning, school’s cancelled because Kurt and Ram killed themselves in a repressed homosexual suicide pact.

 

Veronica perches on one of the matching coffins at the funeral and mimics the priest’s speech. She’s wearing a football jersey with **RS** on the sleeve over a sheer black dress. Her feet are bare and grass-stained. She has a little bit of blood in the corner of her mouth. She catches his eye and waves. JD feels nauseous.

 

“Tell me the similarity isn’t incredible,” Veronica says that night. She’s examining her faked suicide note with an almost childish glee, wearing one of his flannels that reaches mid-thigh and not much else.

“It’s incredibly similarity,” he says. “Listen, Veronica, you have to stop doing this.”

“Doing what?” She blinks at him with false innocence.

“Murdering people! Christ, Veronica, you can’t just…you can’t…”

Her face darkens and he knows he’s said the wrong thing. “I _can_ and I _will_ ,” she says petulantly, stepping over to his window and jumping out. He doesn’t see her fly away.

 

When he goes back to school, he doesn’t see Veronica and he thinks maybe, just maybe, he was worried about nothing. She probably got bored and moved on to another school, or went back to Hell or New Jersey or wherever the fuck she came from.

 

_(He’s such a fucking idiot)_

 

It’s Green Heather, although she isn’t wearing green anymore, that finds the body in the girls’ bathroom. He’s taking an English test -doodling feathers on the corner of an English test, really- when they hear the scream. JD shoves his way through the crowd to see Cheerleader Heather, eyes still open, pill bottle clutched in one hand. She’s sitting against the tiled wall and she’s so very dead. Veronica’s lying in her lap and humming to herself as she twirls a strand of blond hair around her finger. She catches JD’s eye and winks.

 

When JD sees her next, sitting by the football field talking enthusiastically with one of the stoner girls, he grabs her by the arm and shoves her against the wall at the back of the school. “Who’s next, huh?” he demands. “The principal? Heather whatshername? Are you going to just keep killing until everyone at school’s dead? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Veronica stares up at him with lucid brown eyes. Her tone is bored. “Are you done?”

“Am I -no, I’m not fucking done, Veronica. You can’t”

She hisses and grabs his wrist, _hard_. “Are you sure you want to finish that sentence?”

 

The doctors say it’s just a sprain, and he got lucky the bone didn’t snap. At least it wasn’t his dominant hand.

 

He searches through old internet pages on how to get rid of a demon, but pretty much all of it is bullshit, and he’s pretty sure that nobody at Westerburg would work as a virgin sacrifice anyway.

He traces the handle of his gun. Murder fantasies were a lot more fun when he knew he couldn’t go through with it.

 

“Iron,” says the hippie teacher when he asks her, because yes, he’s that desperate and out of options. “Or, that’s what the legends say anyway. I heard about it on this retreat -“

He files it away with all the other useless information he’d picked up, but when teachers find her dead in her office with sharp, talonlike scratches disfiguring her face beyond the point of recognition, JD thinks she might’ve been onto something.

 

( _He knows his time’s running out but fuck if he’s going to let her little murder sprees continue_ )

 

He’s pondering how _exactly_ he’s going to do it, lost in thought, when Green Heather -well, it’s not like the distinction’s necessary anymore -slams into him. She grabs his shirt, eyes full of tears. “You have to help me,” she stammers. “She’s coming -help me, hide me, please!”

The students around her all snicker at the fall of their alpha bitch (“Heather’s gone mad,” they’re whispering gleefully, and, “I told you she was gonna snap sooner or later”), but JD knows genuine fear when she sees it. “The girl with the raven wings?” he says, and she nods, terrified.

A draft blows the school’s doors off their hinges and rattle the locker windows, but the students continue on as though they can’t see any of it. Veronica stalks down the hall. She’s wearing tattered stockings with a pale blue shift, the light behind her giving her some wretched sort of halo. Her wings are flared, but when she speaks it’s with devastating calm.

“You have something that belongs to me,” she says, evenly.

Heather whimpers. “Please.”

And sure, he doesn’t like Heather, but that doesn’t mean she deserves -he thinks of Fleming’s face, nose entirely gone, eyes scratched out. “She doesn’t belong to you, Veronica,” he says, one hand curling around his revolver and the other yanking Heather behind him, like some fucking hero in some shitty western.

Veronica meets his eyes with a small, bemused smile. “I don’t understand.”

“Veronica -“

“You _all_ belong to me.” Wraithlike, she raises her hands and the student body of Westerburg completely freezes, like actors in a tableau. She closes her fists and the locker doors pop off their hinges, one by one. “This _world_ belongs to me.”

A locker door misses them by an inch, and Heather shrieks.

“You live because I allow you to live!” Veronica’s voice is rising to a shout. “You breathe because I allow you to breathe!”

He hears a crackling noise beneath his feet, and now there’s fire.

“You _bleed_ when I want you to _bleed_ , and you _die_ _because I say so_!”

Heather makes the mistake of breaking eye contact, trying to run. Veronica screams, and all the windows shatter, raining glass down upon the still-petrified students. She walks over blood and broken glass until she’s standing in front of Heather, eyeing the other girl with contempt.

“I gave you your _life_ back, bitch,” Veronica murmurs. “You _owe_ me.”

Heather struggles to speak through her sobs. “I-I didn’t-I never…”

“You wanted them gone and I delivered. Now it’s your turn.”

Heather dissolves into terrified, unintelligible tears. Veronica turns to JD and rolls her eyes. He can read her expression easily - _Seriously?_

A hysterical laugh bubbles up in his throat like acid and he fights it down.

“Pick your battles, Jason,” she says, almost musically. She jerks her chin at Heather. “You sure you want to pick that one?”


	3. drowning in the hourglass (i guess your time is up)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It ends how everything ends -a lot of fire, and a little bit of blood.
> 
> (chapter title from "Swan Song" by set it off)

Heather follows him around the rest of the week like a fucking puppy. He doesn’t have the energy to tell her to get lost, so he atones for his sins by listening to her bitch.

“What are we even looking for?” she gripes, leaning against a bookshelf, frequently glancing from side to side.

“How to kill her,” he replies without looking up. “The fuck kind of deal did you make with her anyway?”

When he does look up, Heather’s chewing on her lip anxiously. “I don’t know -I just -I really wanted Heather Chandler gone, and I said I’d do anything, and then -it all happened so fast.”

“And now you owe her a favor.”

“She’s going to kill me!”

“That’s the favor?”

Heather’s lip is bleeding and she swipes at it absentmindedly. “I -she just said she’d tell me when the time came.”

For a moment, JD’s tempted to smack her for being stupid enough to make a deal with a devil -but it’s not like he’s blameless in all of this, and she looks pathetic enough as is.

 

The next day, Heather tugs him into the girls’ bathroom to show him the X cleanly dug over her heart with a talon. The skin is broken, and there’s dried blood, but nothing vital was punctured. She’s shaking so badly she can hardly speak. She wore all white today, probably to stand out from all the red and black at the pep rally/impromptu memorial, but JD can’t help thinking that she looks a little too much like a virgin sacrifice.

“Does it hurt?” he asks. She rolls her eyes, the most attitude she’s shown in a while. “Yes, you psycho, the X scratched into my fucking flesh is kind of stinging a little. You have to do something!”

“I don’t know how to kill her!” he snaps back, his temper rising.

“Well, maybe if you got off your ass and _tried_ something, you would know!”

He starts to storm away, and he’s mid-dramatic exit when she says, “Wait, fuck, I’m sorry. I’m just—don’t let her kill me. Please.”

They hide in the unused chemistry lab. The best solution they can come up with is to burn Veronica with fire.

“But, a lot of fire,” Heather Duke points out. “Write that down.”

He fights the urge to roll his eyes, since it’s not like he has a better idea.

 

They’re sitting together at the pep rally -Heather’s bitchy followers have abandoned her, and she’s less concerned with her reputation in terms of the whole life-and-death situation. “Do you smell smoke?” Heather asks absently.

“It’s probably just some stoner under the bleachers,” JD says, and then freezes when his eyes find Veronica, dressed in a cheerleader’s uniform that’s a bit too big for her, leaning against a door marked BOILER ROOM. Her fingertip is on fire, and if he looks closer he thinks he can see smoke coming out of the partially-open door. From the sharp intake of breath, he assumes Heather can see her too.

“We need to get out of here, _now_ ,” she hisses. “She’s going to blow the fucking school.”

“I’ll get the fire alarms,” JD replies, but Heather shakes her head. “They don’t work. School doesn’t have enough money to fix them. Let’s _go_.”

For a second he does consider it, but he looks at Veronica again, at her sly smile and doe-eyes, and he thinks that the idea of killing her sounds much better.

Heather Duke grabs a fire extinguisher and thendoes what she does best -follows.

 

The boiler room is on fire, and in front of it all, Veronica stands silhouetted against the flames. She is inhumanly gorgeous, almost blinding.

“You brought her,” she says with a smile that it hurts to look at. “Thanks for saving me the trouble.”

“Can you take care of the fire?” JD asks Duke. She nods. “Good. Do it.”

“Wasn’t this your great plan?” Veronica asks as she stalks towards him. “Killing me with fire?”

He swallows. His throat is suddenly really dry. He backs up against a wall.

“Here’s your fire, Jason Dean,” the hollowboned girl teases. “Do it.”

He hesitates, and that’s when she kisses him (he kisses her back, although he hates himself for it). It’s a vicious, violent kiss, and they both come out of it with their lips bleeding. (her blood is the color of an oil spill)

One of her hands is on his throat, and Veronica’s eyes are distant, as if she’s counting his heartbeats.

That’s when Heather Duke hits her with the fire extinguisher.

“Heather, what the fuck?!” JD yells as Veronica crumples to the ground. “You were supposed to put out the fucking fire!” It still rages around them, and JD doesn’t know how much longer they have left.

Heather Duke wipes her sooty hands on her skirt. “It was empty. Probably should have expected that, public school and all.”

“It’s about time you showed some balls,” Veronica snarls. She rises gracefully from her crouch, shoots upward. She barely has enough room to hover, and her wings spread out, creating menacing shadows along the wall. “I was starting to think you were all tears and talk.”

Heather Duke makes a low, snarling noise in her throat JD didn’t know humans were capable of making and hurled the heavily dented fire extinguisher at the girlbirdthing again, but this time Veronica catches it, and tosses it back, bored. It slams Heather against the staircase, and she coughs out blood and then lies still. JD can’t tell if she’s still breathing.

 

They fight. He tackles her into the fire and pins her down long enough for her wings to catch flame (the fire is golden against the purple-black of her wings, and he’s never seen anything more beautiful). It’s probably the smoke inhalation but just for a second JD’s vision doubles and he sees two girls -Veronica, dark eyes wide, red mouth in a petty human grin, and Veronica, pupils glowing golden and letting out a shriek.

Then, the dying monster rips out his throat and that’s where they die.

(The school should have caught on fire. The boiler room should have caused an explosion, but it didn’t. A few witnesses say they saw a girl in black tights taking the full force of the explosion, but it’s possible they were lying in order to get more drugs.)

 

Heather Duke got a funeral.

That weird kid in the trenchcoat who never talked didn’t. Officially, he’s still MIA.

 

JD wakes forty years later on the edge of death with healed scars across his throat and memory wiped clean. His darkly-feathered wings balance him as he stands in the ruins and laughs. _she won anyway_

 

_Epilogue_

They say that Westerburg High is haunted.

It had to close down after one too many unexplainably violent deaths in the ’80s.

Of course, there’s a group of drunk, dumb teenagers that sneak into the deprecated building anyway, ducking under bright yellow caution tape, their footprints swallowed by the ash. Usually happens once per generation. They don’t come out, but it keeps happening anyway. Kids will be kids, right? Reckless, fucked-up youth from fucked-up parents who probably considered themselves rebels at some point or another too.

 

“Don’t even want to be in this fucking building,” the boy mutters, but his friends are already up ahead, examining the animalistic scratches on the decaying walls. A few lights still flicker. Behind him, he hears a soft laugh, the rustle of feathers and the clicking sound of a lighter. “Me neither,” says the shadow of a voice, dry from underuse, from above him, and then the kid’s just another stain on the floor.

**Author's Note:**

> did this instead of working on my many, many multichapter fics.


End file.
